‘Lifestyle’ as the new wayward: child welfare, sexual exploitation and young people

Child abuse reviews and research explain a plethora of reasons why sexual exploitation continues to occur undetected within the child welfare system. The evidence includes young people being difficult to work with, child welfare workers having limited knowledge about exploitation and inadequate staffing levels. In this article, I argue that there is also a practice-based epistemological failure, specifically a failure in how child welfare workers ‘come to know’ girls and young people. I draw on formal reviews of child abuse and interrogate a common word in these reviews: ‘lifestyle’. I apply a genealogical approach, demonstrating that ‘lifestyle’ is tied to an epistemological failure, a failure that is acutely consequential to practice. I discuss how the word ‘lifestyle’ rests in culture, that is, in the social history, social structures and social imaginary of the female gender. I argue that the use of this word dismisses the very social context in which it arises, erasing relations of subject formation and the socio-political context of violence against girls and young women.